Comment by causi | Hacker News Reader

Comment by causi | Hacker News Reader

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“Nuclear power plants are not the solution to climate change. To make fuels for nuclear power plants, we have to go through the whole process of uranium mining, transporting, and disposing. Considering this fact, there will be a lot of carbon emissions.”

When you're so rabidly anti-nuclear that you ignore the fact uranium is 1.5 million times as energy-dense as coal, you are an ideologue. Uranium has so much energy per kilogram you could fuel the world's reactors by shipping it via airplane.

There's plenty to criticize about the environmental damage of uranium mining. Carbon emissions is not one of them.

It's my opinion this choice to attack nuclear energy by casting it in whatever critical light is trendy rather than its actual weaknesses demonstrates Morgan is against nuclear energy for ideological reasons that have nothing to do with its actual dangers, hence she is doing little or no risk/reward calculation, and that her future choices will not be based on human energy needs and accurate assessments of nuclear technology and industry.

By comparison, mining of coal emits carbon, and using it emits carbon. Double whammy of carbon emissions.

I don't know the person we are discussing about in this thread and I don't know her opinions or the opinion of German green party etc, but I do know some arguments of green parties here in France that are also anti nuclear too (note also that France and Germany are very different when it comes to nuclear as here most of our electricity is nuclear already)

The arguments they make is that producing electricity and most usage of electricity are bad for our planet and thus we should use less electricity if we want to preserve it (and as a result wouldn't need to add extra nuclear or coal capacity).

This part is often forgotten which results of thinking they want to replace nuclear by coal, which would be absurd.

I imagine it's probably hard to imagine that someone would think that seriously from a US perspective (one of my US based colleague asked "when are you getting AC in Europe??" when here many people are wondering if the Americans are going to stop being crazy with their freezing AC ^^)

> The arguments they make is that producing electricity and most usage of electricity are bad for our planet and thus we should use less electricity if we want to preserve it

Unless they have ideas about how people and society can continue to accomplish all of the things we want to, using less electricity, this is not a serious argument. It's simply ideological fluff, advocating for people to embrace a lower standard of living for nothing in return.

If a person advocates against cleaner sources of energy on the grounds that "we should just be using less energy", then I don't think they are a serious person and they should be ignored. Let them go live their hippie life on a commune somewhere and free up the space for the adults to talk about real solutions.

Well, what they would get in return is preserving the planet were we live. Even if they don't have children, the consequences of the past and current carelessness are already showing and severely impacting many people's life.

But there are also plenty of things that can be done to reduce energy consumption without impacting anyone's little confort. Regarding thermal confort the obvious solution is to improve insulation so they wouldn't have to heat or cool as much and might even save money in the long run

> Well, what they would get in return is preserving the planet were we live. Even if they don't have children, the consequences of the past and current carelessness are already showing and severely impacting many people's life.

The anti-nuclear-power movement started 60 years ago. Imagine what our past would look like now if instead we had replaced all coal and gas with nuclear back then. Is there a chance we would have had more disasters? Sure. But it's impossible to know. What we do know for a fact is that coal and gas emissions are killing the planet.

We have a problem with CO2 emissions and here you are talking about better insulation in homes to reduce power usage. We have a great, direct solution to reduce emissions by orders of magnitude. But no, let's continue to burn gas and coal, just use less of it.

This is why I say anti-nuclear isn't a serious position.

> Imagine what our past would look like now if instead we had replaced all coal and gas with nuclear back then

It's not hard to imagine, I'm French and we did replace most things with nuclear back then ^^

The result is that right now we are purchasing (probably coal made) electricity to our neighbors because around 50% of our theorical nuclear capacity is unavailable either for maintenance or because we don't manage to cool them enough with the current heat :)

Nuclear is certainly a good thing overall but not the obvious and only solution to all problems as some would like to believe.

It's people like her that won't sit down at a spreadsheet and put in basic arithmetic for things like recurring costs, nonrecurring costs, amount of pollution (broken down for the entire lifetime of the energy source) and make an educated call. They just react to their own knee-jerk opinion that they do not want to have challenged.

The problem with nuclear is that the other side does the same, which is why it's hard to have interesting discussion on the topic. If you want actual arguments on how nuclear is not the miracle energy some people would like to believe it is, look how here is in France half of our reactors had to be shutdown because of the heat during the recent heatwave or for maintainance, how we are unable to build those new gen reactors in any predictable deadline and budget, and how we struggle to shutdown older reactors which means we have to pay to prolong them over and over which is getting more and more expensive - and it's for an old tech from the 70s.

Of course there are many upside to it too (low carbon emissions and not from Russia among the obvious ones)

But it's pretty rare to find balanced and nuanced speech on the topic unfortunately, and I don't find the anti nuclear side to be any worse than the pro nuclear side on this.

Do you think she cares? She's just catering to the common person.

The life-cycle CO2 emissions of nuclear power may become comparable with those of fossil power as high-grade uranium ore is used up over the next several decades and low-grade uranium is mined and milled using fossil fuels.

https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2051332

Their worst-case scenario is still twice as much power per kg of CO2 as natural gas and over four times as much as the lignite used in German coal plants.

Indeed, however no one (or nearly) now advocates those energy sources (as they emit way too much greenhouse-gases). This is to compare to emissions of renewables sources.

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